I want to say first that I came to Spain without my ax to grind. I didn't
bring messages from anybody, nor greetings to anybody. I am not a member of any political
party. The only group I have ever been affiliated with is that not especially brave little
band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of
humor. I heard someone say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effective
weapon. I don't suppose I ever really believed it, but it was easy and comforting, and so
I said it. Well, now I know. I know that there are things that never have been funny, and
never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

I was puzzled, as you may have been, about Spain. I read in our larger newspapers that
here was a civil war, with the opposing factions neatly divided into Reds and Whitesrather
as if they were chessmen. Even I could figure out that there is something not quite right
when Moors are employed to defend Christianity. Since I have been here, I have heard what
the people in the streets say. Not many of them call it the "war." They speak of
it as the "invasion." Theirs is the better word.

There cannot be, in all the world, any place like the city of Madrid today. It has been
under siege for nearly a year. You read about besieged cities in medieval days and you
say, how awful things must have been, thank goodness they don't happen now. It has
happened in Madrid and it goes on happening. In a city as big and as beautiful and as
modern as Washington, D.C.

The dispatches say that there is not much doing on the Madrid front nowthere is
very little activity. It is what is called a lull. But all day long you hear the guns, the
dull boom of the big guns and the irritable cackle of machine guns. And you know that
gunners no longer need to shoot just for practice. When there is firing, that means there
is blood and blindness and death.

And the streets are crowded, and the shops are open, and the people go about their
daily living. It isn't tense and it isn't hysterical. What they have is not morale, which
is something created and bolstered and directed. It is the sure, steady spirit of those
who know what the fight is about and who know that they must win.

In spite of all the evacuation, there are still nearly a million people here. Some of
themyou may be like that yourselfwon't leave their homes and their
possessions, all the things they have gathered together through the years. They are not at
all dramatic about it. It is simply that anything else than the life they have made for
themselves is inconceivable to them. Yesterday I saw a woman who lives in the poorest
quarter of Madrid. It has been bombed twice by the fascists; her house is one of the few
left standing. She has seven children. It has often been suggested to her that she and the
children leave Madrid for a safer place. She dismisses such ideas easily and firmly. Every
six weeks, she says, her husband has forty-eight hours' leave from the front. Naturally,
he wants to come home to see her and the children. She, and each one of the seven, are
calm and strong and smiling. It is a typical Madrid family.

There are fifty thousand babies still there. All food is scarce, and dairy products are
almost memories. But the Republican government has stations all over the city where a
mother may get milk and eggs and cereals for her baby, regularly, without delay. If she
has any money, she may buy them at cost. If she hasn't any, she is given them. Doctors say
that the little children of Madrid are better nourished than they ever were in the old
days.

The bigger children play in the streets, just as happily and just as noisily as the
children in America. That is, they play after school hours. For during siege and under
shell fire, education in Republican Spain goes on. I do not know where you can see a finer
thing.

Six years ago, when the royal romp, Alfonso, left his racing cars and his racing
stables and also left, by popular request, his country, there remained twenty-eight
million people. Of them, twelve million people were completely illiterate. It is said that
Alfonso himself had been taught to read and write, but he had not troubled to bend his
accomplishments to the reading of statistics nor the signing of appropriations for
schools.

Six years ago almost half the population of this country was illiterate. The first
thing the Republican government did was to recognize this hunger, the starvation of the
people for education. Now there are schools even in the tiniest, poorest villages; more
schools in a year than ever were in all the years of the reigning kings. And still more
are being established every day. I have seen a city bombed by night, and the next morning
the people rose and went on with the completion of their schools. Here in Madrid, as well
as in Valencia, a workers' institute is open. It is a college, but not a college where
rich young men may go to make friends with other rich young men who may be valuable to
them in business with them later. It is a college where workers, forced to start as
children in fields and factories, may study to be teachers or doctors or lawyers or
scientists, according to their gifts. Their intensive university course takes two years.
And while they are studying, the government pays their families the money they would have
been earning.

In the schools for young children, there is none of the dread thing you have heard so
much aboutdepersonalization. Each child has, at the government's expense, an
education as modern and personal as a privileged American school child has at an
accredited progressive school. What the Spanish Republican government has done for
education would be a magnificent achievement, even in days of peace, when money is easy
and supplies are endless. But these people are doing it under fire....

The government takes care, too, of the unfortunates of war. There are a million refugee
children in Spain. A million is an easy number to say. But how can you grasp what it
means? Three hundred thousand of them are in the homes of families and seven hundred
thousand are in children's colonies. When it can, the government wants to have all in
colonies. I hope that will happen, because I have seen some of the colonies. Where is no
dreadful orphan-asylum quality about them. I never saw finer childrenfree and
growing and happy. One colony was in a seaside resort, near Valencia. There were sixty
children, from four to fourteen, who had been going to school in Madrid. And the fascist
planes had bombed the school.

It was amazing to see how many of these children could draw and draw welland it
was heartening to see how their talent was encouraged by the teachers. When they first
came to the colony, the children drew the things that were nearest and deepest to themthey
drew planes and bursting bombs and houses in flames. You could see by the dreadful
perfection of detail, how well they knew their subjects. Now they are drawing flowers and
apples and sail-boats and little houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys. They are
well children now.

And in Valencia, a few miles away, the fascist planes come over and the bombs drop, and
so there will be more children who will draw planes and flames and fragments of bodies
blown in the air. That is if there are any children left.

I can't get any pleasing variety into this talk. I can't tell you amusing anecdotes of
the boys in the trenches. I don't think there are any such stories. The men who fight for
Republican Spain, the men, who in less than a year have come from a mob wearing overalls
and carrying sticks to a formidable disciplined army, are no gangling lambs, endearingly
bewildered as to what is which front and who is on whose side. These are thinking men,
knowing what they do, and what they must go on doing.

They are fighting for more than their lives. They are fighting for the chance to live
them, for a chance for their children, for the decency and peace of the future.

Their fight is the biggest thing, certainly, that we shall see in our time, but it is
not a good show. This is no gay and handsome war, with brass bands and streaming banners.
These men do not need such assurances. They are not mad glamorous adventurers, they are
not reckless young people plunged into a chaos. I don't think there will be any lost
generation after this war.

But I, as an onlooker, am bewildered. While I was in Valencia the fascists raided it
four times. If you are going to be in an air raid at all, it is better for you if it
happens at night. Then it is unreal, it is almost beautiful, it is like a ballet with the
scurrying figures and the great white shafts of the searchlights. But when a raid comes in
the daytime, then you see the faces of the people, and it isn't unreal any longer. You see
the terrible resignation on the faces of old women, and you see little children wild with
terror.

In Valencia, last Sunday morning, a pretty, bright Sunday morning, five German planes
came over and bombed the quarter down by the port. It is a poor quarter, the place where
the men who work on the docks live, and it is, like all poor quarters, congested. After
the planes had dropped their bombs, there wasn't much left of the places where so many
families had been living. There was an old, old man who went up to every one he saw and
asked, please, had they seen his wife, please would they tell him where his wife was.
There were two little girls who saw their father killed in front of them, and were trying
to get past the guards, back to the still crumbling, crashing house to find their mother.
There was a great pile of rubble, and on the top of it a broken doll and a dead kitten. It
was a good job to get those. They were ruthless enemies to fascism.

I have seen the farms outside of Valenciathe lovely green quiet farms. There is
soil so fertile, since the government has irrigated it, that it yields three harvests a
year. So hospitable that oranges and beans and potatoes and corn and pomegranates all grow
in one field. I have seen the people in the country and in the cities wanting only to go
about their lives, only to secure the future of their children. They ask only as much as
you have, because they are people like youthey want to get up from their tables and
go to their beds, to wake to a quiet morning, and the sending of their children off to
school. They don't think of accumulated money. They want to do their own work in
self-respect and peace. They want the same thing that you havethey want to live in a
democracy. And they will fight for it, and they will win.

But in the meantime it makes you sick to think of it. That these people who pulled
themselves up from centuries of oppression and exploitation cannot go on to decent living,
to peace and progress and civilization, without the murder of their children, and the
blocking of their way because two mentwo menwant more power. It is incredible,
it is fantastic, it is absolutely beyond all belief... except that it is true.

Originally published in The New Masses, November 23 1937. Dorothy
Parker was a critic, poet and co-founder of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.